Craft

What is a Dark Moment? It’s a particular event in the backstory of your lead character. It’s not a happy event. It’s a terrible event. It’s not necessarily the worst thing that ever happened to your character, but it’s something that has bent your character’s life and is bending it now as your story opens. …

This post, I want us to go deeper into Character Creation. A lot deeper. I’d like to talk about how you develop each character’s voice. Voice is one of those things that are hard to define but easy to see. There’s a big difference between Scarlett O’Hara’s voice and the godfather’s. Just listen to them talk …

Plot’s good, but it’s not the whole story. The reason the plot matters is because it matters to the characters. Readers read because of the characters. If you replaced your characters with unfeeling robots, your readers probably wouldn’t care about your story. So how do you design your characters? I recommend starting small. Here are six questions …

Last post we talked about the first layer of plot for your novel—your one-sentence summary. The purpose of a one-sentence summary is to break the ice. To separate people who are in your target audience from people who aren’t. To give your target audience an opportunity to say, “Tell me more!” So let’s say you’re at a …

Plot is a complex beast. A novel has at least six layers of plot. This month, we’ll look at the outermost layer—the one-sentence summary. Why write a one-sentence summary? Because your one-sentence summary is a powerful sales tool. If you’re traditionally published, you need to sell your story seven times: You have to sell it to your …

There’s a bit of magic that happens to all writers at one time or another. You sit down to start writing and the words aren’t coming. You keep at it for a bit, and the words still aren’t coming. You press on and on, and the words still aren’t coming. And at some point, the words start coming. The …

World-building is extremely important in three categories of fiction: science fiction fantasy historical fiction It can also be important in other categories, but world-building is most strongly associated with the above. Going Deep or Going Wide World-building is a large topic with many aspects. We’ll focus on people groups, but keep in mind that it’s not the …

People who can remember the 1980s know that there’s such a thing as a world without an internet, and it’s possible to have an economy that runs on paper, not electrons. That’s a very different economy than the one we have now. A lot of the jobs people have today didn’t exist in 1980. If …

I’ve been talking about world-building in the last several issues of this e-zine. World-building is a big topic, and I’ve now discussed social networks, people groups, and the economy of your story world. This month, I’ll talk about taboos. In a sense, taboos are the opposite of values. I define values by the following template statement: …

A novel is not just some random collection of events. A novel is a story. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and they’re connected. There’s a direction to the story. The beginning is about the lead character’s pursuit of a certain ending. The middle is about all the complications that come from pursuing that …